Most people
assume the worst when their edit system starts
acting up. If you’re getting a signal or device
control problem, it might not be your machine (or
even your software). A $10 cable can tear down an
entire edit session. Follow these steps:

Shut down the
computer to avoid any improper dismounting of
media drives.
2 Isolate the suspected “problem”
device.

Be sure to
reseat both ends of the cable.
4 If that doesn’t work, try swapping out the
cable.

Continue to add
devices until the problem recurs. Then repeat
this cycle.

You might be surprised how many
times this works.

Remember, there’s more than just FireWire cables;
there are USB cables, RS-422 cables, monitor cables
and extensions, and fiber-optic cables. Even your
audio and video cables (RCA, BNC, XLR) could be
culprits. “What, no video? Oops, my RCA came
unplugged.”

A lot of new
users call us up asking about that exclamation
point or nice green check mark on their image. We
tell them that Final Cut Pro has an Artificial
Intelligence engine, and it’s approving of the shot
or edit. Or, if there is an exclamation point, then
there’s content that’s inappropriate for people
younger than 18. They thank us and hang up the
phone.

After about five minutes, they call us back and ask
if we were pulling their legs. Well, Final Cut Pro
does have a secret AI engine. If we told you more,
we’d be put on double-secret probation, but the
exclamation point and checkbox actually mean
something
else.

They’re used to determine if your video is
broadcast safe/legal. An exclamation point means
you’re not broadcast safe, and a green checkbox or
one with an up arrow means you’re okay. Now how did
this get turned on? Well, the keyboard shortcut for
this is Control + Z, so people often accidentally
hit it when trying to do an Undo (Command + Z) or a
Fit to Window (Shift + Z).

A fundamental keyboard shortcut is using I to mark
an In point and O to mark an Out point. In fact,
three-point editing is the key to quickly (and
accurately) assembling your rough cut. Want to
really speed your way through the Viewer and
Canvas? Try the following advanced keyboard
Options. Combine the modifier key with I for in or
O for out.

Shift– Go to In Go to Out
Quickly jump to the set mark.
Useful for checking points before making an edit.

Option– Clear In Clear Out
Quickly clear a mark to change an edit. You don’t
need to clear a mark if you’re going to make a new
mark.

Control
–Set video In
point Set video Out point
Useful for performing a split edit. Only visible if
a separate audio In point is set.

Command +
Option– Set
audio In point Set audio Out point
Allows you to make a split edit where the audio and
picture change at different points.

This is a great
little filter to remove AC noise from a track.
Usually this happens because a power line was
running parallel (as opposed to perpendicular) to
your audio cable when you recorded your scene.

Leave the
frequency set to 60 (as in 60 cycles) if you were
shooting in the U.S. or set it to 50 if you were
shooting in a country where the power is 50
cycles.

Q adjusts the
filter resonance. Higher values result in a
narrower but stronger resonance, which limits the
frequencies affected by the filter.

Gain is
essentially the sound pressure level (a.k.a. how
loud the audio is).

What about all
those harmonics? Think of them as reflections or
echoes of the original 60-cycle hum. Use only the
harmonics you need because you may start removing
frequencies you want in your audio.

For one reason or another you may get an audio pop
at the edit point or even within a clip. Most video
applications allow you to edit video at the frame
level. Final Cut Pro goes way beyond this by
allowing audio edits as small as 1/100th of a
frame.

1 Open the clip
in the Viewer by double-clicking, and choose the
Audio tab.
2 Place the playhead over the click.

Zoom in as far
as possible by pressing Command + =. When zoomed
in all the way, you’ll see a highlighted region
that’s one frame wide.
4 Hold the Shift key down, and drag the playhead.
Park over the exact place where the pop
appears.

Use the Pen
tool to add four keyframes in a row. The center
two keyframes should straddle the audio problem.
The outer keyframes are placed a few 100ths of a
frame from the pop.
6 Drag the inner keyframes down to –60 db. The
unwanted noise should now be inaudible. The rest
of the clip should sound unaltered.

This is one of
our favorite gotchas. Recently, a client called us
and was extremely frustrated; he was rather worried
that somehow his tricked out Final Cut Pro system
was possessed and had ruined all of his media.
After calming him down a bit, he described the
symptoms as really staggered and jumpy playback and
it looked like the footage was really low rez even
though it was high def.

After a few more questions the fix was clear. In
the RT pulldown on the Timeline, settings for
Playback Video Quality and Playback Frame Rate were
set too low and quarter respectively. No wonder he
was getting ugly playback!

If you have similar symptoms, the RT menu is often
one of the first places to check. While there are
many combinations here, we find that setting both
Playback Video Quality and Playback Frame Rate to
Dynamic will offer the best balance of real-time
playback and quality.

1. Look in the
Autosave Vault.Before panicking, simply try
going back a few versions. Do a search for Autosave
in the Finder. Look in the folders for a backup of
your project file. Work your way backward through
the recently saved copies.

2. Create a new
user account.Create a new user account for
testing purposes. This is a great way to see if the
problem is a corrupt preferences file. Most Final
Cut Pro preferences files are stored in the user’s
settings. Open the System Preferences panel under
the blue Apple. Click Accounts. Click on New User.
Create one call test, and give it admin privileges.
You can assign it a password or not. Only use this
account for troubleshooting (you may want to keep
it for the future).
Now, log out, and log in as the new user. Try
opening Final Cut Pro. It should open with no
active project files. If it opens, you’ve narrowed
the problem down to bad user preferences (see next
tip) or a bad project file.

3. Test the
project file.Next, open the project file that
was causing the problems. (If it was stored in the
other user folder, you won’t have access to it. Log
in as the original user, make a copy of the file,
and move it to a shared location such as the media
folder or the top level of your hard drive—not the
desktop—that’s owned by the user.)

If it opens, you’ve confirmed it was the
preferences. If it crashes, it could be bad media
or renders, or something has become corrupt in the
application or the OS.

4. Delete the
render files.
Delete all the render files. Don’t worry—you can
rerender a lot faster than you can rebuild the
project. To find render files, look on your media
drives for the Render Files and Audio Render Files
folders. Terminate them with extreme prejudice.
Yes, it’s Apocalypse Now for your render files.

Try reopening the project. Success? If not, try
hiding the media files from the project. Disconnect
the media drive, or drop the media into another
folder. If the project opens with the media
offline, you’ve got a bad media file. (An
alternative is to open the project file on another
machine—same rules apply.)
5. Recapture the media.If you determine you have a bad
file, you can either load/relink media back into
the project in small groups or batch recapture the
media from the original tapes. If you’re still
getting tanked, send the project to a friend to see
if it’ll open on their machine. This is the best
way to determine if you’re having a hardware,
application, or operating system issue.

6. Still
broken?At
this point, you may need to call your reseller or a
consultant.

This sounds
like something from etiquette class, but this
little activity can save hours of headache
throughout your system. In the Utilities folder in
the Applications folder, there’s an application
called Disk Utility. Under the First Aid tab
there’s a button to repair permissions (Repair Disk
Permissions). Select your drives and let it rip.
You should run it a couple of times. It’s amazing
how so many of those little quirky problems will go
away.

Things can and
do go wrong. A simple reset to your system is often
the best way to “cure” software problems. Don’t
just click Restart, however; let the system fully
reset itself by shutting down. As a favorite
engineer used to tell me, “Shut down, count to 20,
restart—if there’s still a problem, then call me.”

Too many tracks in
your Timeline, and you want to scroll up and down
quickly? No need to grab the scroll bar on the
right edge if you have a three-button mouse. Put
the cursor over the Timeline, and use the third
button to scroll up and down. It gets better; hold
down the Shift key and you can scroll left and
right (if you’re using an Apple Mighty Mouse, just
scroll). Don’t stop now—place the cursor over the
Viewer or Canvas, and you can scrub backward and
forward. If you aren’t impressed yet by Apple’s
thoughtful engineers, go try these shortcuts in a
bin, on effect sliders, and even in the audio
mixer.

Looking for an
easy to way add backgrounds, textures and other
elements to your project without having to break
the bank on expensive stock animation libraries?
Fortunately the wonderful folks at Apple
understand. Motion ships with tons of free content
that you can use in your projects (all of it
royalty-free).

To access this
content from inside Motion choose the Library tab
in the Utility pane (Command + 2).
2 Then choose the Content folder from the list.

One of the
coolest new features in Motion 3 is the ability to
use the Paint Stroke Tool to do a very cool write
on effect. While there are lots of ways to
customize this effect, lets take a look at the
basics.

Select the
Paint Stroke Tool (P).
2 Make sure your HUD is active (F7). From here
you can choose several options, such as brush
color, width, pen pressure and pen speed (yes,
this works with graphics tablets).

At the bottom
of the HUD there is a pull-down for shape style.
Here you can choose dozens of different pre-built
shape styles for the Paint Stroke Tool. Be sure
to check out the very cool light strokes and
organic elements.
4 To really get the effect right, make sure the
check box for Write On is checked.

It’s not unusual for your
skies to be washed out. This is often a
problem, because video doesn’t offer the same
dynamic range as film (the difference between
darks and highlights). Fortunately, Final Cut
Pro allows you to isolate the color
correction, so you can achieve a fix just to
the problem area.

Using the
Select Color eyedropper in the Limit Effect
controls, select the desired color you’d like to
keep.

Click the key
icon to view the matte. Use the Select Color
eyedropper while holding down the Shift key to
add to the matte. You can click in the Viewer or
Canvas window.

Finesse the
matte by adjusting the Width and Softness sliders
for the Chroma, Saturation, and Luma values in
the Limit Effect controls. When the desired color
is clearly selected, there will be no holes in
your matte. Also, adjust the Softening slider to
improve the matte. You may get a better matte by
using fewer limiting ranges.

Click the key
icon twice to toggle back to View
Final.

Adjust the
color balance wheels and saturation of the
shot.

You may need to
add a second color corrector to finesse the scene
or isolate another problem area.

For the past
few years Apple has been pushing Motion as a tool
that should be in every editor’s toolbox. The
problem has been, not every editor has had the time
or patience to learn Motion. In Final Cut Pro 6,
Apple recognized this and has integrated Motion
templates directly inside of FCP.

To launch a Motion template in Final Cut Pro you
have three options:

Choose the
Effects tab in the Browser > Master
Templates.

Choose the
Generators pulldown in the Viewer > Master
Templates.

Choose the
Sequence menu > Add Master Template.

Choose the template that you want and load it into
the Viewer. Once the template has been loaded in
the Viewer, clicking on the controls tab will let
you change various parameters of the template.
There is only one catch:

Not every parameter of a template is editable in
Final Cut Pro. Text entry, size, tracking and
populating drop zones with footage are the only
parameters you can adjust inside Final Cut Pro.

If you need to edit a template to, for example,
change the text color, or swap out a background,
you need to edit the template in Motion. Here’s
how.

Edit the
template from the Viewer into your
sequence.

Right-click on
the template and notice at the top of the
contextual menu you have two options: Open in
Editor and Open Copy in Editor. Since the
template is a prebuilt one from Apple, you can’t
save over it (it’s locked) so you need to choose
Open Copy in Editor.

Make your
changes in Motion and save the file. Your changes
will update in FCP.

Timecode
burn-in is used to assist in referencing back to
parts of show. Typically this has been used on VHS
tapes for producers so they can comment on shows,
etc. These days it’s more common to use QuickTime
files and DVDs for this type of work. Since you’re
going to have to encode the video anyway (most
likely using Compressor), why not add timecode
burn-in at the same time?

Fortunately, a great new feature in Compressor 3
allows you to do this.

Inside Final
Cut Pro select the sequence you want to
export.

Choose File
> Export > Using Compressor.

Inside
Compressor select the setting you’d like to apply
to the file. With the setting active, select the
Inspector window and click the Filters
tab.

Choose Timecode
Generator.

Change the
settings for the Timecode Generator as you see
fit.

Apply the
setting to the clip in the Batch
window.

Submit the job.

Note: If you’re trying to choose the Timecode
Generator for an Apple preset you’ll notice there
are no filters in the Filters tab of the Inspector.
To be able to add the Timecode Generator to one of
the Apple presets, you’ll have to duplicate it
first (then it becomes a custom preset).

What people
tend to forget is that you are sending YouTube a
master for them to compress; therefore, send the
highest quality you can, that fits within their
limitations. YouTube.com is well know for being the
busiest video-sharing site, but unfortunately,
YouTube uses the much older Sorenson Spark codec
for their video encoding. This was the “improved”
video format for Flash 7 but is based on the very
old H.263 video conferencing codec. Even when new,
this was an old, inefficient codec.
Many people send YouTube an already compressed
video, and are disappointed when they see the
quality that results on YouTube. That’s because
most of the information was first thrown away by
the encode before upload, so there was little
quality left to be encoded to Flash 7.

The goal
is to give YouTube a master that they can use for
encoding:

YouTube has two
limitations: no more than 10 minutes per video
and no larger than 100 MB per video.
• YouTube converts everything that is uploaded to
Flash 7 video at 320X240 (although they've
started to also do 640X480 in H.264).
• Remember the good old days of VHS distribution?
You wouldn’t give the duplicator a VHS copy of
the show to duplicate. No, you’d give them the
highest quality master you could. Therefore, to
get the best quality from YouTube, give them a
high quality “master” that is close to 99 MB.

Here’s how to pull this off:

Use QuickTime
Pro or Final Cut Pro to exports to .mp4 with
H.264 video.
2 Export as MPEG-4 with H.264 and set the size to
320X240. There is no point providing more
resolution than YouTube’s finished size. By going
direct to that size means that you can devote
bandwidth to making that master look great,
instead of sending excess size that will be
scaled down. The bonus is that you get to control
de-interlacing and scaling.

From here on
there are two choices: calculate the maximum data
rate that will keep the file under 99 MB, or use
some general purpose settings.

Zoom into a
part of your audio file that contains just the
background noise that you’d like to remove.
Select the audio in the Soundtrack Pro Timeline.
4 Choose Process > Noise Reduction > Set
Noise Print. The noise print identifies the
frequencies that you’d like to remove from the
file.

Select the
audio in the Timeline that you’d like to repair
(this will usually be the entire Timeline).
6 Choose Process > Noise Reduction > Reduce
Noise. The Reduce Noise dialog
appears.

Click the
Preview button (play icon) to hear the noise
reduction previewed.
8 Drag the Noise Threshold slider left to lower
the threshold, or drag it right to raise the
threshold.

Drag the
Reduction slider to the right to increase the
amount of noise reduction.
10 Use the Tone Control slider left to preserve
more of the bass or treble content.

To toggle a
before and after state, click the Bypass button.
12 When satisfied, click the Apply button.

Our favorite
way to rip and up-convert music from stock music
CDs is to use iTunes.
We all know music CDs are recorded at a sampling
rate of 44.1kHz. Final Cut Pro and digital video
love to work at a sampling rate of 48kHz. Yes, we
know Final Cut Pro can up-sample on the fly, but
why waste CPU power that could be going to your
real-time video playback?

Another dialog
box opens. Here, select a sample rate of 48.000
kHz. Click OK and then OK again.
7 Now click the General button.

Under iTunes
Music Folder Location, change it to target your
desktop. (This will make it real easy to find and
move your newly ripped tracks.)
9 Pop in your CD. If you’re connected to the
Internet, iTunes will go to the CDDB and grab the
album name and track names. (Yes, it seem as if
most of our library music is listed in the CDDB.)
This is great because most of the work is done.
Create a playlist of all the tracks you want to
rip.

Click Import,
and you’re done!

Once you’ve set up your preferences, just “rip and
roll” every time you need to grab a music cut.
Fast, easy, elegant…and of course…cool.

Offset the
channel to taste, usually a value of three to ten
pixels for the X and Y axis will work, but you
may need to vary this based on the size of your
graphic.
4 Experiment with the Edges settings to refine
your look.

Most transitions have
hard edges; that looks bad enough. Avoid the
temptation to add a colored border, or you’ll
really be traveling back to the days of clunky
tapes that were heavier than a MacBook. Instead,
try feathering the edges and adjusting the width of
the border. In our experience, the client will find
the effect far more pleasing.

The Gradient Wipe is
the most useful transition inside Final Cut Pro
(after a Dissolve of course). Don’t be turned off
by how the effect looks on its own; without an
image dropped in the well, it’s useless. The effect
creates a transition between two clips by using a
luminance map. The transition will occur between
the darkest and lightest areas in the map. Why is
this so cool? You can create as many transitions as
you like using graphic files. Make your own or
download away.

Are you a 24p addict
just like us? Don’t worry, there is nothing to be
ashamed of! Some cameras, like Panasonic’s Varicam
can record 24p (really 23.98) within a 720p60
signal. It does this by duplicating frames. To get
back to 24p you can remove what is known as
Advanced Pulldown to get the footage back to 24fps.
You can do this on capture from a FireWire source
(like Panasonic’s AJ HD1400).

One question we get asked a lot
is, when working in HD, is progressive or
interlaced better? The question is not as simple as
it might seem. Here is some food for thought:

Consider progressive if:

you might
possibly be going back to film.
• you might have to create additional versions of
the show. It’s easier to create interlaced
versions from a progressive master than the other
way around.
• you have a lot of motion. Progressive footage
tends to look “smoother.”

Consider interlaced if

compatibility
with existing NTSC interlaced television is a
must. Not having to convert from progressive
reduces the possibility of introducing artifacts.
• you have a lot of detail. Interlaced footage
tends to look “sharper” when compared to
progressive footage.

Open format Timelines is one of our favorite
features in Final Cut Pro 6. They become
particularly useful when you need to integrate SD
footage into an HD show. However, you need to make
sure a couple of options are set up correctly.

Open up User
Preferences by pressing Option + Q.

Choose the
Editing tab and in the lower right-hand corner
make sure Always scale clips to sequence size is
checked. With this box checked, Final Cut Pro
will scale your SD footage to the HD frame but it
will not distort the aspect ratio. The result
will be a blown up pillar boxed
image.

Open up your
sequence settings by choosing Sequence >
Settings or Command + 0 and choose the Video
Processing tab.

If, for whatever reason, you did not have the
Always scale clips to sequence size checked in your
User Preferences you would have ended up with your
SD image centered in the HD frame as a small box.
Don’t worry though, you can fix this.

Select the SD
clip you want to scale.

Choose Modify
> Scale to Sequence.

The clip’s
scale has automatically been adjusted to fit the
HD frame size.

While the scale to sequence method can be very
helpful in working with SD footage in HD projects,
scaling is happening (potentially a lot) so expect
some degradation of the footage.

Note: Be wary of the Conform to Sequence command
also found in the Modify menu. This command will
adjust not only scale, but also aspect ratio
possibly resulting in a stretched SD image if you
conformed to an HD sequence. Conform to Sequence
will also adjust field dominance by applying a
Shift Fields filter if needed.

So you’ve just
completed your high definition masterpiece when you
find out that you need to create a standard
definition letterboxed version of the show.
Thankfully, this is pretty easy inside Final Cut
Pro.

Take your high
def sequence and nest it in the new one you just
created.

If you’re asked
if you want to conform this sequence to the new
one, choose No.

Voila! You now
have a letterboxed version of the show because
FCP maintains aspect ratio of the original
sequence its scale was reduced to fit in the 4x3
frame.

Additionally, after you nest the sequence you can
open it in the Viewer and increase its scale to 70%
(this will, of course, depend on your acquisition
source—70% is derived from HDV footage). This will
essentially edge crop the original HD sequence.
Just be very careful—if the footage was not shot
4•3 safe—you could be cutting off important action
and/or framing.

Before we print
to tape, we step through our finished shows one
edit at a time, just to make sure we don’t have any
black flash frames. Use the up and down arrow keys
to take you from edit point to edit point. If your
Canvas shows a black frame (or unintentional
frame), you have a flash frame. Switch to trimming,
and you can take the offending frames out.

Need to make a
show loop for a client’s tradeshow booth or front
entry? Final Cut Pro makes it easy for you to make
money. In the Print to Video or Edit to Tape dialog
boxes, you can specify how many times a show should
loop. You can also add black in between each
segment.
Feel free to
use the Bars and Tone options because they’ll only
be added to the first pass; all of the loops will
contain just the program content.

When outputting
material to tape, an Audio Mixdown feature was a
recommended precaution to ensure you didn’t drop
frames. Choose Sequence > Render Only >
Mixdown (or press Command + Option + R).
You can also
map this as a button, and place it into the
Timeline button bar.

Need to save
some space? Reference movies allow you to work with
your video clips or
sequence files in other applications. Think of a
reference movie as a pointer back to the
original media, a lot like a link on a web page.
Follow these
steps:

Choose File
> Export QuickTime Movie.

Name the file,
and choose to not make the movie self-contained.
This will save you disk space by referencing back
to the media on your local drives. That being
said, the media can’t be deleted, moved, or on a
different machine that’s unreachable via a
network.

Import the file
into your other video application, and start
working.

Reference movies are useful when working in After
Effects, Cleaner, iDVD, or other applications where
you want to work with a large video file. This is a
useful way to export a sequence or longer segment
of clips as one file. If you want to permanently
save the video clip, be sure to check the
Self-Contained box. Just remember that an hour-long
show at DV-quality will need more than 12 GB of
space!

We love Color!
Finally, we have a professional-level color
correction and grading tool.
It is important to know, however, that when you
send a sequence to Color, there
are limitations. And depending on your project,
some of these limitations can be
important.

Most filters that
you have applied in Final Cut Pro will not be
previewed or rendered by Color. Once you have
rendered and sent your project back to Final
Cut Pro from Color, the filters you’ve applied
will once again take effect. This is especially
important for Color Correction or Image Control
filters (with the exception of the Color
Corrector 3-way which is translated as a
correction in the Primary Room in Color). Prior
to sending to Color, it’s a good idea to remove
those filters, as you might get weird results
when your project has returned to Final Cut Pro
and those filters are again active. In general,
you want to choose either Color or Final Cut
Pro to do your color correction and grading
work, and not mix the two.

Track layering
will be maintained in Color, however Opacity and
composite modes will not be previewed or rendered
out of Color. Instead, this information is
maintained and rendered in Final Cut
Pro.

Like filters,
transitions are not previewed or rendered by
Color, instead, the transitions are rendered when
the project returns to Final Cut Pro.

Speed effects
are maintained and previewed by Color (although
variable speed effects do not play properly in
Color). They aren’t, however, rendered by Color;
instead, Final Cut Pro renders them.

Generators like
text and shapes, still frames, Motion and
LiveType Project files that are in your sequence
are ignored by Color and will not be previewed.
Their position on the Timeline is maintained and
when the project is sent back to Final Cut Pro,
they will relink and be displayed
again.

If you do need
to color correct or grade generators or graphics
material, you will need to render them out of
Final Cut Pro as self-contained QuickTime files
and reedit them back into your
sequence.

Most users avoid the
QuickTime transitions folder. We’re not sure
why—perhaps it’s because the transitions are oddly
named. Try the following transitions out when you
seem to be running low on ideas:

Explode:This warps the
outgoing clip into a tunnel-like wipe. We find
this particularly useful when going between
graphics and an incoming clip. Offset the center
of the wipe to match the focal point of the
incoming clip.

Iris:The QuickTime Iris
transition is worlds better than the Final Cut
Pro Iris transition. Choose from 26 different
shapes. Particularly nice is the ability to
repeat the Iris pattern with separate controls
horizontally and vertically. Be certain to check
this one out.

Radial:With similar
options to the Iris transition and 39 patterns to
choose from, this effect needs to be on your
radar screen.

Wipe:This one transition
has more options and possibilities of all the
transitions contained in Final Cut Pro’s wipe
category.

Rack Focus
effects are often used by camera ops to add a
feeling of movement in the image without actually
moving the camera. Typically, these effects happen
at the head of a clip to act as a transition. From
time to time we’ve found the need to simulate a
rack focus. Fortunately, this is really easy using
a Gaussian Blur filter.

If you have
several drives or a large storage network hooked up
to your edit system, finding files or reconnecting
clips can be very time-consuming. You can
streamline the search process by harnessing the
power of Search Folders. By customizing the Search
Folder list with specific directories (such as
drives or project folders) you can limit your media
searching to a specific destination. When
reconnecting offline media you can use the Search
Folder list to speed up the re-linking process.

To add or
replace a search folder:

Open up your
System Settings window by pressing Shift + Q. and
choose the Search Folders tab. It is empty until
you add a search folder.

Click the last
Set button in the list to add a new search
folder. You can click the Set button next to an
existing search folder to change it.

Use the File
dialog box to select a folder. Select a folder,
then click Choose.

You’re working
on a clip in the Viewer, but you can’t remember if
you loaded it from your Browser or the Timeline—not
a problem. Final Cut Pro distinguishes between
clips opened from the Browser and clips opened from
the Timeline. Clips opened from the Browser have a
plain scrubber bar; those loaded from the Timeline
have two rows of dots in the scrubber bar, similar
to the sprocket holes in a strip of
film.

We absolutely
adore Apple’s Keynote software. Besides importing
PowerPoint files and creating beautifully animated
3D charts, it likes to share. In fact, it can
create any QuickTime format. Just set up your
document for a video size and export a QuickTime
movie with the Export command.

Want to go
straight to tape when you choose Print to Video
without having to press Record on your deck and
click OK? You need to turn on Auto Record and PTV
after three seconds. To access this advanced
control, you need to call up your Audio/Video
Settings folder:

Choose Final
Cut Pro>Audio/Video Settings.

Go to the
Device Control Presets tab, and modify your
current Device Control preset that has worked for
you.

Check the Auto
Record and PTV after: X seconds box, and specify
a time to wait. Three seconds is usually enough.

Note: The PTV setting is a
function of your camera and deck and may not be
supported by all devices. This is a hardware
option, not a software
setting.

Apple offers an
excellent service for online storage, tools, and
utilities. One of those utilities is Backup, which
is designed to synchronize some of your key system
settings. Any file can be added to Backup and be
told to archive to your iDisk (the Internet storage
that comes with a .mac account). Be sure to add
your active project file to the backup list and
tell it to archive every night. This is an
excellent way to preserve a clean copy of the
project file.

Sometimes you don’t
have the time to do an online session and ingest
your clips as uncompressed, or maybe you just don’t
have the equipment to support the process. Either
way, here is a quick way to achieve uncompressed
space via software. Just be aware that this method
won’t make your video look better, but what it will
do is give you great bandwidth for color correction
(versus DV or HDV, for example), and make your text
and graphics look as good as possible.

Start by
creating a new sequence and load the uncompressed
10-Bit preset.

If you’re
working in HD simply change your frame size and
pixel aspect ratio to the flavor of your choice.
Click OK to save the changes to your new
sequence.

Find your
original sequence in your Browser and drag it to
the Canvas. Make sure you’re holding down the
Command key as you don’t want to nest this
sequence (Command will make all the clips come in
as individual clips, not as a nest) and choose
Overwrite. Also make sure you have the same
number of video and audio tracks as your original
to ensure clips don’t get lost.

All of your
clips will be placed in the Timeline and simply
choose to render the sequence.

If you’re going back to tape make sure your hard
drives are fast enough to support uncompressed
playback (might be a big issue if you’re attempting
to do this with HD).

If your final output is DVD or the web, don’t worry
about not being able to play it back, as you’ll
simply output the file through Compressor and don’t
need real-time playback.

Maybe you’re lucky
and you have a huge 42TB Xsan set up for central
storage in your facility—besides being technically
really cool, we’re super jealous! Xsan and other
Storage Area Networks (SANs) are a perfect way to
share media files and project files.

One area that can quickly get people into trouble
is opening a single project file at the same time
on different machines. Perhaps no other Final Cut
Pro-related Xsan issue causes more corruptions,
headaches and lost work.

The fix is simple. DO NOT open the same project
file on multiple machines at the same time. Of
course there are times you will want to open the
project file at the same time, so here are a couple
of ways to get around the issue.

Duplicate the
project file and label it with a suffix like for
_bob_72207 where Bob is the person getting the
file and the numbers are the date.

If you don’t
like duplicating project files (to prevent
clutter) make sure that you ask others on the SAN
before opening. An easy way to do this is by
using iChat and enabling Bonjour messaging. That
way everyone can talk without having to leave
their edit suite/office and it doesn’t require
they have an AIM or .Mac account.

Just dropping a bunch
of cameras at a location will not give you great
coverage. Successful directors know they must plan
out their shots to map out coverage. Here are a few
important things to make sure of:

Map Out
Coverage: What sort of angles do you need? A
two-person interview looks great with three
cameras but a concert event might need eight
cameras to capture the experience.

Use a Floor
Plan: You’ll need to create a floor plan for your
shoot that identifies talent and camera
positions. Be sure to plan this out ahead of time
and distribute to all of your crew.

Plan for
Lighting: Camera coverage will have a HUGE impact
on your lighting strategies. Try to avoid lights
getting too far behind cameras and operators;
otherwise, you’ll get unwanted shadows on the
set.

Make Sure You
Have Enough Power: Eight cameras plus a three-ton
grip truck’s worth of lights can put a big drain
on a circuit. Make sure you have identified where
your power is coming from and that you have
enough extension cords/stingers to get you the
needed juice.

Sure your Timeline
had lots of red segments, but why? Have you been
neglecting your machine? Did your tower get jealous
when you took the laptop home with you? It’s hard
to really know why an effect needs to render and
what is blocking real-time performance.

Or at least it used to be hard. Final Cut Pro 6 is
a lot more willing to share. As long as you have
Tooltips active (see your User Preferences) you can
better tell what’s going on. Just roll your cursor
over a red segment and hover. Render status bars
now provide detailed Tooltips as to why a segment
with red render status bars can’t play back in
real-
time.

Now, if we could just use the same trick to figure
out why our kids and spouses get mad sometimes.

If you’re using
glows, drop shadows, or soft edges, you’ll likely
have a soft edge in your alpha channel. To get the
best key possible, you want a clean glow or shadow.
But this is difficult if you don’t dig deeper into
your import graphic settings.

By default, Adobe Photoshop
creates a premultiplied alpha channel (an alpha
channel that follows the edge exactly). This causes
problems, however, because the background color
will be visible around the edges of your graphic.
If you do nothing, this will be a problem, because
your glows will look “dirty,” and partially
transparent drop shadows will come through too
strong.
In Final Cut Pro, it’s important to identify what
the graphic was on top of when the alpha channel
was created. If you had a black background, choose
Black. If you had a white background or the
transparency grid, choose White.

Keyboard shortcuts
are great,and they’re even better if you actually
learn them. We find color-coded keys to be a plus,
and lots of manufacturers make great keyboards for
Final Cut Pro and other applications. But chances
are you have a perfectly fine keyboard that came
with your computer.

Instead of buying a new keyboard,
check out Logic Keyboard. They sell a
do-it-yourself kit (complete with a key ripper).
It’s an easy swap and they have keys for both types
of recent Apple keyboards. Plus it’s far cheaper
than buying a whole new keyboard. Installation
takes about 10 minutes. But here’s an important
tip: take one key off at a time and replace; the
first time we tried it we had trouble remembering
where every key went.

One question we get a
lot is “why does my text look so soft?” While there
are few answers to this question, but the most
common reason is the codec that is being used for
the sequence the text resides in. Compression heavy
codecs like DV and HDV tend to make text look soft.

Consider “up-rezing” to an
uncompressed sequence when you’re done with your
show to help with the text and graphics. If you’re
going back to tape you’ll need pretty fast hard
drives to play this sequence back, but if you’re
outputting to DVD or QuickTime you don’t need to
worry if your drives can play this back.
To “uprez” your sequence use the following steps:

One of the
biggest new features in Final Cut Pro 6 is the
ProRes 422 codec. The idea behind the codec is to
give HD quality at SD data rates. And it works!
Comparing ProRes 422 footage side-by-side with
uncompressed HD, it’s almost impossible to tell the
difference. As an added benefit, it was designed
with real-time performance in mind.

The codec is available in two modes—the standard
ProRes 4:2:2 and ProRes 4:2:2 (HQ), which stands
for high quality. The codec can be used for both SD
and HD footage, though most of the time you’ll use
it solely for HD footage. Pro Res 4:2:2 is
currently one of the best alternatives to an
uncompressed SD or HD workflow.

There are a number of ways to
work with ProRes 422 in FCP.

Capture and
edit in ProRes 422 using capture and sequence
presets.

Transcode your
video to ProRes 422 using the Media Manager or
Compressor.

Render to
ProRes 422. Sequences that use either native HDV
or XDCAM HD and that use long-GOP MPEG-2 can see
significant increases in RT performance by
rendering to ProRes 422. To do this, choose
Sequence > Settings or Command + 0 and then
Render Control. In the Render section, choose
ProRes 422 in the codec pulldown.

Inside the Color
Corrector 3-way, you’ll see three eyedroppers in
the upper area. These are useful for fixing color
balance. Think of this as white balancing in post;
we’ve even fixed video shot on the wrong camera
preset.

Use the Whites
eyedropper to click on something that should be
white. Don’t go for the whites of someone’s eyes;
go with a large area such as a wall.

Use the Blacks
eyedropper to click something that should be
black.

The Mids
eyedropper really only works when using a chip
chart or something with 50-percent
gray.

If the color
balancing is overcompensated, you may need to
drag back toward the center in the color
wheel.

The Replicator in
Motion is a very cool tool for creating patterns
out of shapes. It also happens to be a cool way to
create a custom transition. Worried you don’t know
Motion? Don’t worry, we’re simply going to use
Motion’s prebuilt Replicators to create a
semi-custom transition.

Launch Motion
and create a project to match your FCP project
size.

In the Utility
pane click the Library tab (Command +
2).

Choose
Replicators > Transitional.

Click on one of
the prebuilt Replicators listed. As you choose
different ones, they will be previewed in the top
part of the Library tab.

Choose one you
like (we chose Dots Burst Edge Out) and drag it
to the Canvas

Play back the
Canvas with the space bar. Pretty cool right?
Problem is, it’s just a little boring. Let’s fix
that.

Click on the
Replicator in the Canvas.

Choose the
Inspector tab in the Utility pane (Command + 3)
and then the Replicator tab.

About three
quarters of the way down, find the Color Mode
pulldown. Here you can keep the original (white);
Colorize it, which lets you pick a color; Over
Pattern, which lets you create or choose a
pattern of color by picking a number of
repetitions; or Pick From Color Range, where you
can choose or create a range of colors for the
Replicator.

Lets choose
Over Pattern. Notice below the Color Mode
pulldown a new parameter appears called Color
Gradient. We could make our own gradient but for
simplicity’s sake, lets choose a prebuilt one
from the Gradient pulldown to the right of the
display of the gradient.

Choose one you
like (we chose Candy Corn).

Next, setup the
Timeline for export. To do this simply drag the
playhead in the mini Timeline (which is right
above the transport controls).

Seems like everyone
is talking about making their video look more like
film these days. One characteristic of film is
grain. There are lots of fancy (read expensive)
filters out there for simulating film grain, but
here is an easy and free method for creating grain.

Determine the
clip you want to effect.

Select either
the Generators pulldown in the Viewer or choose
the Video Generators bin in the Effects tab of
the Browser and choose Render >
Noise.

Edit the
clip on the track above the video clip you want
to effect, making sure it’s the same length as
the video clip below.

Toggle your
clip overlays on (Option + W).

Adjust the
opacity of the Noise generator in the sequence
down to a low value (10–15).

If needed, go
back and adjust the opacity level of the noise
generator to taste.

Note: You might have two
Noise generators in the Render category. One of
them is a native to FCP (FxScript) and the other is
from Motion (FxPlug). It’s easy to distinguish
them, the FCP as one is black and white and the
Motion one is color. This tip used the FCP Noise
generator.

All of the major
applications in Final Cut Studio support the use of
an external video monitor. However, each
application is a little different in how you set it
up and not all applications will support every
configuration of hardware cards or decks. Be sure
the hardware is powered on and properly connected
before launching an application.

In the past few
years, tapeless acquisition and post–production
have really taken off. One really popular tapeless
format is Panasonic’s P2. Capable of shooting DV
all the way up to 1080p, it’s one cool format!
Apple recognized this format and built the Log and
Transfer window (although Log and Transfer does
support other tapeless formats).

It’s called Log and Transfer
because you’re simply just transferring digital
files from disk to disk. This is unlike tape-based
media that you have to capture into a file on disk,
i.e. Log and Capture. To launch Log and Transfer
choose File > Log and Transfer or Shift+Cmd+8.
Overall, the Log and Transfer window operates like
the Log and Capture window. The big difference, of
course is how it ingests the media. Unlike Log and
Capture where you have a few options for how to get
the footage on to disk, with Log and Transfer you
simply log your clip and then click Add
Clip/Selection to the Queue to begin the transfer
to your scratch disk.

So you’ve
worked hard getting a perfect mix and have created
submixes, outputted your show and are ready to
archive your show as a self-contained QuickTime. In
the past, if you were to do this, your audio would
be mixed down to stereo or as grouped channels
(i.e., stereo and dual mono).

Now, in Final Cut Pro 6 you can export individual
discrete channels very easily.

Open up the
Sequence Settings (Command + 0) window for your
sequence.

In the General
tab in the bottom right-hand corner there is an
area labeled Audio Settings.

Change the
Config pulldown option to Discrete and click OK
to save the change.

Choose the File
menu > Export > QuickTime
Movie.

Save the file
as you normally would. Discrete channels will be
saved in the export.

Perhaps you were a
little bit less than careful when ingesting your
footage and now you have 10 hours of footage for a
10 minute show! Don’t worry, we can help you trim
the fat. One thing before we begin, though. THIS IS
DESTRUCTIVE! Please make sure you have a backup of
your media (tapes or archives of tapeless formats).
Also, it’s a good idea to only do this if you’re
sure there won’t be major changes to the show.

Select the
sequence you wish to trim in the
Browser.

Choose File
> Media Manager.

From the Media
pulldown, choose Use existing.

Check the
Delete unused media from duplicated items
box.

Check Use
handles and add a couple seconds of
handles.

Uncheck
Duplicate selected items and place into a new
project if you’d like to stay in this project, or
check it to create a new project. The new project
will contain only the sequence you have selected
and master clips folder with the trimmed
media.

If you have the
duplicate selected items and place in new project
box checked, you also have the option to Include
nonactive multiclip angles. Check this if you
aren’t sure if you will be switching back to
other angles or uncheck it if you’re satisfied
with the current selection of angles in a
multiclip.

Click OK to
start processing the media. If you chose to
create a new project, you’ll be prompted to name
and save the project.

Depending on how your project is set up, you may
also see a dialog labeled Additional Items Found.
This is Final Cut Pro’s way of double-checking
other open projects that reference the media you’re
about to process.

Clicking Add
will bring along that additional media in other
projects;

Continue will
not bring along that media, but may make the
clips offline in the other projects;

Experienced editors
know that changing picture and sound at the same
point (a straight cut) can be very jarring. It’s
more noticeable when both elements change suddenly,
which can be jarring to the Viewer. A much better
method is to try and use an L-cut (so called
because of its shape in the Timeline). In this
case, the picture edit happens before or after the
edit.

These are especially helpful when
editing dialogue because they give the editor
better control over pacing and reaction shots. You
can also use an L-cut to hide a continuity error.
Although the difference may sound small, you’ll
soon discover what an impact they have on a
professional edit. Follow these steps:

Move through
your Timeline and select edit points with the
Rolling Edit Tool.

Double-click to
enter Trim Edit mode.

Use the comma
(,) and period (.) keys to make minor one-frame
edits.

Better yet,
click the Dynamic trimming box, and you can use
the J-K-L keys to quickly trim your show.

If you’re
having system problems and want to clean the disk,
check partitions, and so on, here’s a way to fix
problems without any third-party applications:
Start up in single-user mode, and run FSCK. Uh,
what was that?

FSCK stands for “file system check,” and the –fy
you’ll type just says to go ahead and fix any
problems it finds. Here’s the drill:

The FSCK utility will do its magic, running some
text across your screen. If there’s damage to your
disk, you’ll see a message that says: “FILE SYSTEM
WAS MODIFIED.”

If you see this message, it found some problems and
fixed them—repeat steps 1 and 2 until that message
no longer appears. It’s normal to have to run FSCK
more than once; the first run’s repairs often
uncover additional problems.

When FSCK finally reports that no problems were
found and the # prompt reappears, type reboot to
restart or type exit to start without rebooting.
Then press Return.

One way to
address color calibration between your angles is to
use a calibration card when shooting. This is
relatively easy if you just remember to put a fresh
color balance card on your clapboard for each
shoot.

One of our favorites is the QP Card, an affordable
reference card (http://www.qpcard.se). Priced at
less than $5 per card, this is a great investment
in accurate color.

They are small
and lightweight, easily fitting in your gear
bag.

Relatively
inexpensive and disposable, so you can use a
fresh card periodically. Old cards tend to fade
in the light.

It’s adhesive
on the back so you can easily attach it to your
clapboard.

With a white,
black, and neutral grey surface, color correcting
with Final Cut Pro’s three-way color corrector is
a snap.

$5 spent per
shoot is well worth hours saved on color
correction. In most circumstances, just three
clicks per angle will calibrate across each
camera.

Tired of scrolling up
and down in the Timeline? Need to see audio tracks
1 and 2 so you can mix the music, but there are
sound effects and natural sound living on tracks
A3–A6? Sometimes it’s just hard to see all the
tracks you need.

It’s easy, however, to create a
static region in the middle of the Timeline. The
static region can contain video tracks, audio
tracks, or both. When you create a static region,
you end up with three regions in the Timeline. The
top video portion and bottom audio portion are
scrollable. The middle portion can be resized and
repositioned, but not scrolled. This style of
Timeline makes it easy to constantly see your
dialogue and A-Roll, while still having access to
your other tracks.

To create the static region, drag the thumb tabs to
set the number of tracks. Grab the central tab in
the static region to move it up and down your
Timeline. To eliminate the static region, drag the
video tab downward and the audio tab upward.

While it’s useful that you can
import layered PSD files into Final Cut Pro, it’s
unfortunate that not all features carry over. On
the other hand, when you need to change a graphic
(such as a spelling mistake) it’s very useful to
have those layers...Have your cake and eat it
too—hmm.

Okay, this is easy. In Photoshop, save your files
as LAYERED TIFFs. Final Cut Pro will read it in as
a flattened file, but you can make changes. Better
yet, if you use the Open in Editor shortcut, you
can open and modify the file. In fact you can add,
delete, move, and rename layers with no ill effects
(try that with a PSD file you’ve imported and watch
what craziness breaks loose).

Do you like
carpal tunnel? Stop clicking on each window in FCP
when you want to use it and start using keyboard
shortcuts! With a little practice, you’ll be flying
around the different windows without clicking.

You’ve probably heard
that art directors always look for true quote marks
(“ ”). The same holds true for apostrophes or
single quotes (‘ ’). But how do you access these
when all you have is an engineering-style keyboard?
After all, you probably knew that the key next to
the Return key was for indicating feet and inches
(they look like this, 6' 3’").

Sometimes we miss the
good old days where choosing a frame rate was an
either/or decision. When it comes to HD, one area
of confusion that we get asked about a lot is the
difference between frame rate and field rate.

It’s common to see numbers like
720p60 or 1080i60 as part of a description.

The first part
describes the vertical resolution.

The P or I
describes whether the footage is progressive or
interlaced.

The last part
describes its frame or field rate.

In HD video, frame rate and field rate are often
used interchangeably and it can be hard to tell
what someone is talking about. Here is an easy way
to think of it.

When an HD
format is interlaced, the number generally
describes field rate (1080i60 would describe 60
fields per second).

When an HD
format is progressive, the number generally
describes frame rate (720p60 would be 60 frames
per second).

The interesting thing is that field can describe
frame too! This is because field rates are double
that of frame rates. So 1080i60 footage has a frame
rate of 30fps. Got it? Well, it’s not that simple.
Most of the time numbers like 60 or 30 really
represent fractional field rates (59.94) or frame
rates (29.97) for backward compatibility with NTSC
television. Math—oh, how we hate you.

If color correction
and grading is important to you (we’re certified
junkies) then you should really check out some of
the great third-party tools that are on the market.
There is some overlap between these three
manufacturers, so be sure to download the demos and
try things out.

Nattress
Productions:This manufacturer offers
several powerful tools for processing video; in
the color correction and grading space there are
a few standouts. The Film Effects package offers
great control over 3:2 pulldown, 24p conversion,
and de-interlacing. Plus it has a great library
of preset looks, proper film-style dissolves,
sharpening, and gamma control. Another option is
their Big Box of Tricks, which offers several
filters (more than 70). The package includes
several plug-ins that fix specific image problems
such as noise and flicker. Plus the package
offers great control over levels, curves, and
image stylization effects. (http://www.nattress.com)

Magic
Bullet:The
latest version of Magic Bullet is a suite of
products that consists of three different
products. Magic Bullet Looks allows for the
creation of special looks that process your
image. There are several presets as well as great
options to customize. Magic Bullet Frames offers
conversion from interlaced material to 24p. Magic
Bullet Colorista allows for powerful color
correction. (http://www.redgiantsoftware.com)

Noise
Industries:The Editing Pack offers several
useful tools for improving video images. A strong
collection of blurs is complemented by a
Dewrinkler filter for improving skin. The
Vignette and Matte Generator also offers several
options for creating interesting power window
effects. (http://noiseindustries.com)

Make the
duration of the transition something short (four
frames works well).

Change the
angle to 90 for a Fly By to the right or -90 for
a Fly By to the left.

Locate an edit
point you want to add a transition
to.

Drag the
transition from the Viewer (use the little hand
in the upper right hand corner) to the edit point
on the Timeline. Make sure that you don’t center
the transition on the edit; you want to start on
the edit. If you’re not sure what you did,
right-click on the transition and choose
Transition Alignment > Start on
Edit.

Position your
playhead at the end of the transition you just
added (it helps to have snapping on) and press
Control + V to add an edit (make sure you either
lock your audio tracks or toggle Auto Select off
or you’ll be adding the edit to your audio as
well).

Drag the
transition from the Viewer to that edit point
again, making sure it starts on the
edit.

Repeat the
process one more time.

Play back your Timeline and you should see the
image Fly By the screen a few times. One trick to
make this process easier in the future is to save
the Push Slide as a Favorite.

Ever have a project go bad? A
file get corrupted? Maybe the system crashed (OS X
never crashes—it just has an undocumented close
feature). Worse, you come back from lunch, and the
client is standing over your editing system. “I
just pushed a few buttons, really!”

It’s okay if the Autosave Vault feature is turned
on. This great feature will back up your project
automatically. You tell it how often to save, how
many versions to save, and how many total projects
can be archived. This is a great way to cover
yourself against unexpected events.

If things ever go wrong, simply choose File >
Restore Project.... This way you can quickly access
time-stamped versions of your project. After
restoring a project, immediately select the Save
Project As command and revert to the original name.
Otherwise, the Autosave Vault feature will start
building a new project folder for the project with
a name such as FCP Tips_08_12_08_0241.

Use this the next time a producer pulls a
180-degree turn on you and wants to go back three
hours in time.

It’s not unusual for your
skies to be washed out. This is often a
problem, because video doesn’t offer the same
dynamic range as film (the difference between
darks and highlights). Fortunately, Final Cut
Pro allows you to isolate the color
correction, so you can achieve a fix just to
the problem area.
1 Apply the Color Corrector 3-way filter, and
access the filter’s visual controls.
2 Using the Select Color eyedropper in the Limit
Effect controls, select the desired color you’d
like to keep.
3 Click the key icon to view the matte. Use the
Select Color eyedropper while holding down the
Shift key to add to the matte. You can click in the
Viewer or Canvas window.
4 Finesse the matte by adjusting the Width and
Softness sliders for the Chroma, Saturation, and
Luma values in the Limit Effect controls. When the
desired color is clearly selected, there will be no
holes in your matte. Also, adjust the Softening
slider to improve the matte. You may get a better
matte by using fewer limiting ranges.
5 Click the key icon twice to toggle back to View
Final.
6 Adjust the color balance wheels and saturation of
the shot.
You may need to add a second color corrector to
finesse the scene or isolate another problem
area.